This Week on LinkedIn: ICYMI (I Can’t, You Might Implode)

If you felt unhinged this week, you weren’t alone. The marketer corner of LinkedIn fully lost the plot (not our Plot... but kind of our Plot) over two internet moments that had nothing to do with pipelines or performance dashboards and everything to do with cultural timing, absurdity, and the sacred art of posting.

Let’s recap:

🍗 “Pope Yes" — the Tweet heard by Heaven and CPG Twitter Alike

This week, the Catholic Church appointed a new pope. And yes, it was a big deal. But who really won? Popeyes. They tweeted:

That’s it. Two words. No logo. No CTA. Just millennia of branding fate delivered with crispy precision.

It was the kind of post that made every social media manager spiral:

• Was this prepped years in advance?
• Did someone Slack “it’s time” paired with the gif of Michael Scott screaming in the office?
• Has this been Popeyes’ Super Bowl moment all along??

This honestly felt more like a prophecy than a tweet.

🧸 Elmo Got Laid Off and LinkedIn held an Internet Vigil

Somewhere between “funemployment” memes and actual job loss updates, this gem dropped:

The parody post announced that Elmo had been laid off due to federal budget cuts, and suddenly the entire feed turned into a group therapy session.

People were tagging recruiters. Others were offering hugs. A few weren't sure if it was purely satire or a horrifying sign of the times. (Honestly, yes.)

Why Marketers Obsessed Over These

These two moments are the perfect case study in social media’s power to:

• Weaponize brevity
• Collapse absurdity and reality into one perfectly timed post
• Get more reach than any paid campaign with zero spend and all instinct

Every social team knows the difference between a decent post and a cultural touchdown and the ultimate win is when marketers start to share this and applaud the ingenuity. If your social strategy doesn’t leave room for this—the weird, the warm, the wildly well-timed—then you’re probably not building a brand people care about.

Wanna keep unraveling with us each week? We’ll send you the weird, the timely, and the unhinged scroll recaps straight to your inbox. No fluff. No spam. Just the best of the internet, curated for social media brains like yours.